


London's Burning

by MMXIII



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Apocalypse, End of the World, General despair, Gunshot Wounds, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post-Apocalypse, mormor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 07:45:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1974660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMXIII/pseuds/MMXIII
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When simply staying alive becomes paramount, Sherlock is willing to indulge in an arguably controversial form of solidarity.</p><p>[Or: what use are enemies at the end of the world]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Black

 

 

**Chapter I: London’s Burning**

 

* * *

 

_This is the end_

_Hold your breath and count to ten_

-  **Skyfall** , Adele

 

* * *

 

 

Of course John is furious.

 

‘I don’t understand. I know I don’t get a lot-no,  **shut up, Sherlock** \- but this,  _this._ ’ The chain link rattles under John's fist like loose bones and Sherlock flinches, dread pooling thickly, low in his stomach. ‘How long have you- And you’re  _mates_  now are you?!’

 

John swears quietly, turns something over with his foot.

 

‘He tried to  _kill_  us Sherlock’.

 

 Naturally Sherlock knows this. But the rules have changed; there's nothing left anymore. To burn or to save.

Survival is infuriatingly understimulating.

 

By this point Sherlock has been leaving  _Him_  messages for approximately 2 months, from just after the ash began to fall from the sky like uneven scraps of grey tissue paper, and the waters receded, and the ground, crusted with salt, split apart in tiny fissures and flaked away in the searing winds.

 

As the world corroded around him, he’d played one last  _game._

Scraps of paper tucked into rusty tins, clipped into smashed windshields like the parking tickets of  _before_.

Chemical anecdotes that would go untested, word games, poetry, deductions,  _predictions_.

 

But the last slip of paper that Sherlock lifted from its hiding place – curled around a single new cigarette – had held a scrawled address. Sherlock had stared at it a long time, and John had seen.

 

‘ _Fucking Moriarty_ ’, John growls at nothing in particular as Sherlock prises open a can of cold beans with a penknife.

 

‘If we’re going to do this, we need to find more water-’

 

Sherlock looks up to see the muscle in John’s jaw twitch ominously.

 

‘-all I’ve got is that morphine we took from the bunker. I’m assuming you’ve thought through all the options in that massive fucking brain of yours so you’ll be well away that palliative care really is the only option here… oh and Sherlock-’, John turns his head warily, thinking of the cigarette Sherlock has secreted away, ‘-you shouldn’t smoke; it’s fucking bad for you.’

 

 They eat the cold beans in silence amidst the wreckage of a city, smoke stacks crumbling, a thin silver thread running along the bed of the Thames.

 They haven’t seen another living soul for 52 days.

 

* * *

 

 

_You’ve been following the train tracks for such a long time, the two of you, shadows dragging low and dark across the sleepers. You pass the corpses of trains, rusting to the rails where they stand, and comb each one for anything useful: a cheap, petrol station lighter; a magazine with a crossword inside the back sleeve; an unopened chocolate bar; a coat. Jim leads the way, seems to have some sort of plan - you don't ask questions._

 

_You almost feel a bit like you’re 14 again, playing some sort of game, running off, doing something stupid._

_But Jim is beginning to fray around the edges_

 

 

_And you’re so fucking tired._

 

* * *

 

 

‘Here’

 

The warehouse appears to be largely indistinguishable from the others that flank it. John eyes it warily as Sherlock makes for an opening where the corrugated iron gapes blackly in a grimace of an opening.

‘Whoa, not so fast’.

I-’

‘Nope, me first’

‘ _John_ ’

‘Still pissed off’ he says gruffly

‘I know, I-’

‘You’re an idiot’. It’s almost a snarl; this is not safe. This is not smart.

Apparently Sherlock agrees, staring at the floor –

‘ _Concession_ , that’s new, I like it. Makes a bloody change. And all it took was the end of the world.’

Sherlock says nothing because John's right, this is bloody insane, but the world’s gone to shit anyway, he can _feel_ himself losing his mind, knows john can _smell_ it. Knows John lies awake under the plastic sheeting they string up every night and wonders about the things that still matter.

Survival he supposes, of one sort or another.

 

John slips his Browning from the back of his jeans like he does every night and nods, mostly to himself.  _Fucking psychopath pen pals_.

‘Shall we then?’

‘Alright’, says Sherlock softly, shifting the crate in his arms.

John has no name for the expression on Sherlock's face but here's a trace of excitation in his movements that he spectacularly fails to repress.

 

* * *

_You tip your head back and the sky fills the back of your skull, vast, endless, searing._

_You breathe loudly through your mouth as your eyes water in pain._

_Jim is an unfocused smear of black against a blinding haze, pushing a hand into your hair, pulling your head sharply to the side._

_You’re an idiot’, he says._

_Somebody whimpers._

 

 

 

_You-_

 

 

_You can’t-_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                         _Fuck._

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

The warehouse is quiet, and Sherlock’s heavy boots crunch softly over broken glass. He’s wearing them because John made him, because he _doesn’t bloody look_ where he’s going. John's rubber-soled shoes are almost inaudible by contrast and wearing through. He needs to sort that, soon. Though shoes are quite hard to come by these days. You either find them worn out or you've got to slip them off bodies. They move through the half-lit labyrinth of hollow shipping containers, all gutted and stripped of their contents, Sherlock a pace behind John. 

  

The hair on the back of your John's rises uncomfortably as a low murmuring becomes audible.

John checks and clears the corner; Sherlock straightens as John squares his shoulders.

 

 

 

‘Hello, Jim’.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter II**

 

Jim Moriarty stands with his hands in his pockets, feigning nonchalance, _badly_. He looks gaunt, wild. There’s something reddish brown smeared along his forearm. Something about him is off, slightly to the left of centre.

Behind him, the body of another man is slumped against a concrete support pillar.

 _‘Sherlock_ ’, he says quietly, inclining his head, ‘Dr Watson’

The gun twitches involuntarily in John's hands.

‘Unarmed’ Moriarty says pointedly, raising his palms in a gesture of vague surrender. The skin between his fingers is also stained red.

Sherlock nods, much to John's disbelief.

‘I’m going to keep this thanks’, he can’t help but snarl through loosely but undeniably gritted teeth.

There’s a rasping noise from behind Moriarty’s shoulder. He frowns distractedly.

‘He means them’, says Sherlock, as Moriarty turns back into the half-darkness.

 _Oh_ , says John easing up slightly and catching sight of an upturned crate upon which three hand guns and several knives are piled hap-hazardly.

‘Well Mrs Hudson did leave Baker Street’. Sherlock sounds almost thoughtful; John sets his mouth in a grim line.

Crouching, Moriarty says something to the injured man, rests a hand on his shoulder, lifts the other to touch the side of his face. The intimacy is surprising, even alarming.

‘Sebastian Moran’, says Sherlock, ‘well, technically-’

‘Please tell me this isn’t Christmas for you’

‘John-’

‘Later alright? We will be talking about this later’

Sherlock acquiesces silently.

 _Right then,_  John steels himself, _I am a doctor after all._

 

*

 

_Something catches your eye amidst the rubble and as you reach down towards the giddy flash of yellow, you can’t help the grin, the feral tear of exposed teeth that slides across your face._

_‘Catch’ you yell, half a second before the tennis ball bounces off the back of Jim’s head with a dull thump._

 

*

 

John strides forward, improvised medical kit in hand, and kneels next to Moran. ‘He should be lying down’ he says sideways to Jim Moriarty, Serial killer. Moran’s face is drawn and flushed, eyes half open. The sliver of concern in Moriarty’s face is, is… John pushes it away, it doesn’t make sense.

‘We’ll do it quickly’, he says instead. When he looks up, Moriarty meets his eyes, both men equally surprised by the neutrality in John’s voice.

It’s awkward. Sherlock joins them to manoeuvre Moran to the floor. Disconcerting doesn’t begin to cover it.

Moran groans wetly when he’s laid out on the concrete, blood wells between his teeth. ‘Shut up’ says Moriarty, sliding something under his head with an uneasy care. John can’t help but notice that it’s a balled-up dinner jacket with an obscene label that only Sherlock would recognise. He turns to the box he brought with him for gloves and- when he looks up Moriarty is kneeling, sleeves rolled, hands filthy. The man on the floor is holding his wrist weakly, leaving fresh smears of red; Moriarty is _letting_ him.

‘How long?’, asks John, trying hard not to look at what feels like a profound display of intimacy.

Moriarty looks up briefly.

‘72 hours’, Sherlock supplies. Reaching past Moriarty, John peels back the filthy dressing around Moran's knee, looks at the wound, the pulped joint, and breathes out slowly, _‘Jesus’_

‘Who invited _Holmes_ …?’ slurs Moran, eyes red and sunken.

John sends Sherlock a questioning look but it’s Moriarty who speaks.

‘Morphine?’

‘Psychopaths and their fucking drugs’ says John, not without humour. ‘Let’s get this show on the road’.

 

*

 

Jim’s boy is a brave man, clearly. The pain must have been excruciating, and indeed his eyes are wet, shirt rank with sweat. Eventually his jagged breathing eases, his eyes roll back a little.

To Sherlock’s left, by the hole torn in the exterior wall, Jim lights a cigarette; Sebastian is sleeping, _Sebastian has passed out_.

‘Bad for breathing’, Sherlock says distractedly, almost reflexively, thinking of longlost hazy afternoons at Baker Street as he watches the smoke pouring from Jim’s nose.

Jim watches him carefully, before throwing him the packet. Sherlock catches it high, in front of his face, and fondles the firm cardboard corners with barely concealed hunger.

Jim looks away, ‘breathing is boring’.

The corner of Sherlock's mouth quirks as he lights up with a reverence that John would find incredibly irritating and _inhales_.

**_  
_**

_Oh god._ Glorious.

 

‘These are _low tar_ ’ he says, catching Jim's smirk, but it sounds breathless rather than contrary

Jim simply arches a delicate eyebrow at the corpse of the city.

‘Sebastian’s idea of a joke, I’m afraid’

 

*

 

 

_You look down at him triumphant, enraptured. He grins and makes to kick you in the head but you catch his foot and press your mouth to his filthy sole. You slide his leg back until his knee is bent over your shoulder and lean forwards. The hands pressed into his flesh, your hands, are black under the nails like a child’s. His snarl becomes a low whimper and his head falls back as you slide in a little more and a little more. You put a hand over his forehead to keep it down, pressing your mouth to his throat in something like reverence as his legs tighten around your back. When he gasps you open your teeth over the tendon in his shoulder._

_His hands, one around your bicep, the other clawing at your arched shoulder blades, are strong._

 

*

 

 

 _Breathing is boring_ indeed.

_What a pair of arseholes._

‘We’re all about breathing, aren’t we’, John finds himself muttering, ‘all for it. Personally, I’m a huge bloody fan’.

‘James…’ slurs the man under his hands.

‘Smoking in a hospital, can you believe it’, he jokes easily before feeling a twinge of uneasiness at the thought of Sherlock an Jim spending prolonged periods of time together.

 

 _These are low tar_ , Sherlock complains petulantly in the background

 

 

 

 


	3. III

**Chapter III**

[Sherlock]

They've situated themselves just out of earshot, habitually. _Probably_.

Earlier, Sebastian had been agitated, feverish; Jim had been laconic.

Sherlock thinks of John, strong, _endless_.

_Ceaseless advocator of verbal communication._

‘He makes it quiet, doesn’t he’, he says quietly. There seems little point in playing things close to the chest now. Not when the sky burns around you and the ash pushes up between your naked toes.

Jim looks up at Sherlock, face strangely blank. This close Sherlock can see the small circular burns on his bare arms, the _teeth_ marks.

‘You know, when all the…’, Sherlock wiggles his fingers over his ears in a gesture that falls hilariously short of mimicking the _Baudelairean ennui_ that eats away at his brain.

‘Mmm’, Jim looks away, casting his eye over the broken concrete carcass of the city, the city that stole both of their souls. The city that raised them, _razed_  them. The city that lies in shards under their aching feet.

Sherlock wonders again, as steel girders rise out of rubble like exposed ribs, why Jim's here now. The structure of the world set them apart; Jim's amorality coloured the peripheral regions of Sherlock's kingdom. And yet, the guns lie on the upturned crate, untouched.

There is no kingdom to keep.

 

‘It occurs to me that civilisation rather suited us’, Jim speaks slowly, deliberately.

Sherlock thinks of Jim toppling towers as he nestled in the debris.

‘Somewhat ironic’

‘Don’t be obvious’ Jim says mildy, ‘it ages you’

‘... _dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return_ ’ Sherlock say, somewhat sarcastically.

‘Genesis trois, dix-neuf’, says Jim like it’s funny, ‘King James, how _fitting_ ’

 

Sebastian coughs in the background; the muscle twitches in Jim’s jaw, though his face is impassive.

‘loyal’, Sherlock comments, with a slight incline of his head.

Something like a smile twists across Jim's mouth, ‘perfectly wretched from cradle to grave’

‘But not boring’.

                ‘No. Never boring’

Sherlock think of the hole torn in Sebastian’s side. ‘Looters?’ he asks.

                ‘Mmm’

‘Did you kill them?’

 

Jim doesn’t answer immediately, and Sherlock's halfway to deducing whether his silence constitutes assent when he does speak, quietly and without looking up.

 

‘No. No, there’s nothing _beautiful_ left to destroy’

 

                ‘Certainly an idiosyncratic mode of appreciation’

Jim stand and shrugs before engaging his left hand in a flippant gesture and smirking with one side of his face, ‘As Sebastian would say, philosophic speculation is the invention of the bourgeoisie. _Down with it._ ’

Sherlock laughs in the foreground of an orange sky as Jim slips away.

 

*

 

John peels back the gauze carefully whilst thinking about Sherlock spending all that time with Moriarty. They don’t seem to talk, just staring at each other, the odd phrase sliding between them. It’s a bit like the way Sherlock used to speak to Mycroft, but weirdly less spiteful. John supposes it doesn’t really matter anymore anyway. What _does_ matter at the end of the world?

Survival perhaps. Of one sort or another.

 

The gauze come away stained with a yellowy discharge.

John sits back on his haunches and smoothes one hand over the stubble on his chin.

He turns his head just in time to see something solid lurching towards him

.

*

 

 

_‘How can you not-oh god-what’s it like being you? It must be so **FUCKING QUIET**. All that empty space just-’_

_‘Shut up, James’ you say mildly, ‘it isn’t my fault you haven’t maimed anything in 48 hours. And clean up your shit’_

 

 

*

 

Jim hears before Sherlock does, head snapping around.

 

Sebastian has john in a headlock.

 

‘What’s going on?’ he snarls, blood between his teeth. His gaze is wild, peripatetic, eyes glassy.

‘Easy, mate’, says John, as Jim steps towards them

 

‘Jim, what…?’ he’s disorientated, strongly indicative of sepsis. 

 

A few seconds later Sebastian drops, Jim rushing forwards to catch his shoulders.

John stretches and rubs his neck but says nothing. Sherock can smell him thinking over the stench of old blood.

 

 

*

 

 

You push your fingers through black hair and closed bone as the wind strips the air from your throat.

‘ _Táimid I sáinn an chacamais anois_ ’ he says, laughing.

And when you touch him your hand burns.

 _Everything burns_.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

Sebastian calls out during the night, a strangled sound almost immediately obscured by that of purposeful movement. Sherlock watches silently as Jim coalesces from the shadows and slides down beside him. Jim catches his eyes briefly before turning back to Sebastian and pressing his mouth to the thinnest part of his skull. Sebastian’s hand, shaking, finds the back of Jim’s neck. 

Sebastian subsides, and, for an instant so brief it’s almost hypothetical, the expression on Jim’s face is one of unbearable bleakness.

John doesn’t wake; for this Sherlock is grateful.

 

 

*

 

 

‘Sherlock’

‘Mmm’, Sherlock stirs under the rank fleece blanket. John's eyes flick to the far corner of the room.

‘ _Sherlock_ ’

‘What?’

‘He isn’t going to-’, John pauses, before continuing more quietly, we have to tell him Sherlock, he won’t-’

                ‘ _He knows_ , John’, Sherlock’s voice is tired, heavy.

John glances over again at Jim, propped up against the wall next to Moran. There’s a good foot and a half between them, and yet, the intimacy is palpable. Sebastian is unconscious, splayed out on his back, his blood pressure is barely crawling.

As far as John can tell, Moriarty’s been chain smoking for the last 5 hours just staring into space. He’s barely moved at all.

‘Infection?’ Sherlock murmurs, drawing John back to his side of the room.

‘Yeah. Blood poisoning’

Sherlock blinks slowly, lids heavy. A strange feeling coils in John's throat.

 

‘Sherlock’, he says, and he looks up, eyes almost colourless, face drawn. ‘We’re ok, we’re fine’.

‘John, I- I don’t know if I could-’, Sherock think of Jim crouched over Sebastian, two halves slipping away from each other. The symmetry is obvious, if not unsettling.

John pushes his fingers through the fine hair at Sherlock's temple.

 

 

‘I’m glad you’re here’, he says

‘I know, says John, instead of _I love you_

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Táimid I sáinn an chacamais anois - Irish for "we're fucked now" :P


End file.
